1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a database system and, more particularly, to a database system for effectively performing the setup, exploitation and operations management of database data, and to a database data exploitation support apparatus for effecting the setup, exploitation and operations management of the database data by supporting the exploitations of the database data.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the database system, the data to be utilized for exploiting the data in the various branches of business can be coarsely divided into the data to be managed and stored in a trunk business system for production and sales managements, the data intrinsic to branches, as occur in the individual branches, and the data such as the market data, as occur at the outside.
The data to be managed/stored in the trunk business system are exemplified by the master data such as the product master or the customer master, and the transaction data for recording the daily transactions, and these data are exploited by their combinations while assuring their time consistency.
At the data exploiting time, the types of data to be finally fetched are frequently used by accumulating the values of the data items of the master data of commodities, customers and shops. In this case, the objects to be accumulated such as the data items or the sorting references have to be specifically instructed in addition to the arrangement of the data items from a terminal screen. Therefore, the data exploiter is required to understand the functions and operating methods of the software for supporting the data exploitations and to be conscious of the correspondence between the values of the data items opened in the database and the sorting method intended by the data exploiter. Moreover, the sales of new commodities and the stop of commodity sales may change the references for regulating the sorting method. Therefore, the system for recording/managing the sorting references independently of the master data finds it difficult to follow the change in the master data and is liable to have an inconsistency or mismatch of the data so that it cannot avoid a danger of fetching the erroneous data.
In the prior art, there has been realized a technique for managing the data items of the database by making a dictionary corresponding to the database. However, the dictionary is provided for the individual objects in the forms such as a data storing medium for managing the names and types of data items for establishing the productivity of a program for the database in a manner to correspond to the program, a medium for storing the data of the meaning and use of the data items for the data exploiter, or a medium for storing the definition data for fetching the multidimensional database data while aiming at facilitating the data exploitations.
The dictionary of the prior art does not perform the data managements of the entire system, as centered by the data setup, the data exploitation and the data operations managements, so that it cannot drastically solve the operability and reliability of the data exploiter.